Female anatomy is a project that was born from the collaboration of the writer and music critic Michele Monina and the photographer Zoe Vincenti.
It is a story about a father with a daughter that is becoming a teenager. A story about a body that is changing and the inability of finding the right words to prepare the daughter, in order to tell her the woman she’s going to became. The father, Michele, decided of asking help to some of the most interesting singers-songwriters of the italian indipendent music scene. He asked to each of them to write a song starting from an anatomic part of the female body in order to describe not only the body that is changing but also the meaning of this: what does it mean to become a woman here, in Italy, in these years.
The father called Zoe Vincenti, a photographer, that became his intermediary with the female world. He asked her to fix with the images the story of each singer-songwriter-woman. Stories that inevitably moved from a personal experience to a female universal experience.
This is the fulcrum of the experiment.
Zoe: I did't want to know neither the words nor the idea of the songs before making the photos. I just wanted to know the part of the body that the girls would have told. The game was to tell to each one my idea only during the click. I wanted to know how my memories and my feeling could mix unwittingly with each of them, such as to build a universal map of femininity, as a red thread that could tie one to the others. And this was what happened. Everything that I proposed was from my world, but at the end, speaking, we discovered that was shared. I wanted that they followed me in that place that is inbetween the childwood and the adulthood and that all of us have inside. A place where the visions seems to come from a dream.
This project is already a story, 23 songs and a collections of images. We would like to create a photographic book with a story and a music cd. But maybe also a travelling exibition with readings and concerts. It is a work in progress and we would like to involve also new artists.
The aim is to sensibilze the future generation of women to "stay human" and to belive in their capability and dreams.

This is an ongoing project about the situation of young Moroccan girls who conceive a child outside of marriage. The modernization all over the country and the big opening to the West, try to make Morocco a free and democratic country. However, there are many internal contradictions related to social dynamics and in particular concerning women's rights. Traditionally, in Islamic societies , unmarried mothers are not supposed to exist. To become pregnant out of wedlock is not only regarded as extremely disrespectful to the community, but traditionally, it is illegal. These women and their families are condemned by Moroccan society and most families reject their unmarried daughters, leaving them to care for themselves and their children. Based on a research dating back to 2009 there were approximately 300.000 single-Mothers in Morocco and this trend is continuously increasing. They are forced to live as invisible for the State and the community, because the recognition of identity and social status of a child is achieved only from the the paternal figure. These women are called “Mères Celibataires” due to some Ngos that in the 80's started to report the phenomenon. Moroccan Penal Code punished sexual relations between unmarried persons of the opposite sex with a prison sentence from one month to one year, so unwed mothers were illegal from the first time they declare their pregnancy. In 2004, the “Moudawana” the Family Code has undergone a significant reform. However, the application of the “Moudawana” started in 2011 when the Moroccan Constitution was radically reformed. Large part of society is not ready for this change , because of the strong influence of traditions and religious precepts. Ngos help these girls to try to live a normal life: to get a job, a house, health and school services for them and their children. For all those who do not get help, all that remains is oblivion: illegality and degradation. Data are worrying day by day : 150 children a day are born outside marriage, 23 a day are abandoned. Given to the intense pressure of the civil society towards the problem of the many abandoned children and mothers marginalized, this create a strong debate on Abortion: as many as 600 to 800 Moroccan women secretly undergo abortions every day. The “underground clinics” are frequently ill-equipped and staffed by poorly-trained doctors and nurses. An historical step (though small) to the openness of this serious problem, comes from King Mohammed VI , that for the first time decided to change the abortion law in may 2015 and make it legal but only for fetal malformation or danger for the mother. This is just the beginning of a project I've started with the help of one of the best known Ngos in Casablanca called Solidarité Feminine and her founder Aicha Ech Chenna.

Imider is a group of seven rural villages in the south-east of Morocco, in the area of Ouerzazate. Berber inhabitants of these villages are leading the longest pacific protest of Morocco against exploitation and pollution of their natural resources, from the biggest silver mine of Africa, the "SMI" which is controlled by the Moroccan royal family.
Is the Africa's most productive silver mine, helping to make Morocco the 15th-biggest silver producer in the world. But Imider residents - who are mostly ethnic Amazighs, more than half of whom live on less than a dollar a day - say the mine has drained their water reserves for decades and devastated their agricultural community. According to a September 2015 report by the Global Amazigh Congress, an international organisation focused on the rights of Amazigh minorities, the mine uses 1,555 cubic metres of water per day, which is 12 times the village daily consumption.
Imider territory suffered heavily for this exploitation, in terms of serious pollution of the environment by using dangerous substances as cyanide and mercury (which hurts health, agriculture and livestock ...) and advance the desertification process. Protests started in 1996 , when residents of Imider have set up an encampment of adobe huts on top of Mount Alebban next to a key water valve for the nearby mine.
For the last five years, the inhabitants now known as " Movement on the Road '96 " have organized sit-ins and protest marches against this serious situation of violation of their human, social and economic rights. They have cut off the flow of water from the well that supplies the silver mine. To Guard the well, dozens of villagers have built a permanent tiny outpost on the top of the Mount Alebban and where , in the last five years they live day and night to protect the area by the Société Métallurgique d’Imider (SMI) from flooding their waterways. They also want SMI to provide locals with more jobs. They're still undergoing arbitrary arrests and intimidation by the Moroccan authorities, but they have no intention to quit.

La comunità di Mirapuri, si trova a Coiromonte (Novara). E' stata fondata da Michael Montecrossa, un seguace di Sri Aurobindo e Mira Alfassa, nell'agosto del 1978. E' una comunità non religiosa e non politica, la “città della pace e dell’uomo futuro” ed è dedita a realizzare l’ideale di uno “yoga integrale”. Non vi sono leggi nè regole, a parte quelle in vigore nei rispettivi paesi (Italia, Germania). Non vi sono obblighi finanziari o altri obblighi materiali. Se vuoi vivere a Mirapuri, puoi farlo su base privata o contributiva. A Mirapuri ciascuno lavora e impara su base libera e indipendente.
This place is called Mirapuri, and is located in Coiromonte (Novara). The community of Mirapuri was founded by Michael Montecrossa, a follower of Sri Aurobindo and Mira Alfassa, in August 1978. Mirapuri is neither political nor a religious community, is the"city of peace and the future of man" and is dedicated to realize the ideal of an "integral yoga". There are no laws nor regulations, other than those in force in the respective countries (Italy, Germany). There are no financial obligations or other material obligations. If you want to live in Mirapuri, you can do it on a private or contribution base. In Mirapuri everyone works and learns on free and independent basis.

There is a new generation of Indians that struggles in the name of love. They risk their lives in order to fulfill their dream of marrying the person they want. They run away from their families who, due to the social context, condemn their choices and try to hurt or kill them. They break with the traditional system of values and create a new order. They fight against the caste - still present in India even though Gandhi declared it illegal - and a strict religious system, overcoming these formidable obstacles and following their hearts instead.
This trend is particularly strong in some areas of northern India, in places such as Delhi, Rajasthan, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, where the consequences of globalization and Indian economic development crash against the medieval structures of the society. The struggles of these people are hard: they are coerced into marrying men they don't love and if they refuse they are persecuted by their comunity and threatened with death by their own families. In the Indian society this kind of murder is called “honor killing”.
According to statistics from the United Nations, one in five cases of honour killing internationally every year comes from India. Of the 5000 cases reported internationally, 1000 are from India. The only protection for these “rebels of love” , is in shelters which are developing in Delhi and Haryana led by the Love Commandos , a group of activists that offers protection to couples who face threats, or with the help of another association based in Haryana, called AIDWA ( all India democratic women association ).
Love marriage, is still a taboo in the north of India, something accepted only in Bollywood films or religious tales. This cultural change signified an assertive and empowered new young generation that will drive the country into a deep social metamorphosis.

Southern Border, Chiapas , Mexico. October 2011
Every month nearly 5000 migrants enter Mexico illegally, from the southern border, most headed for the United States. For many women, this journey ends just after the border, in southern Chiapas.
Their escape from poverty ends in the brothels of the border cities, where they decide to stop or are forced into prostitution. This is the story of a group of young girls into two of these brothels in the cities of Huixtla and Frontera Comalapa. In this nowhere land, where every day is dramatically the same , their prison is the only chance to pay for their debts as migrants or to maintain their families in Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala.
Usually a bar owner offered them food and a place to stay in exchange for work. In this area, work for stranded migrant women means selling sex. Almost every town along the border between Mexico and Guatemala has more than 50 legal brothels and countless clandestine ones. In all, more than 1,000 women as prostitutes, most of them, like Sasha, Charytin, Dulce, Cristina, Milena (not their real name) set off with hopes and dreams toward the north and yet today find themselves trapped in slavery.
Their only escape is the bar out front, where they passes the day awaiting clients who pay five dollars for a few minutes of commercial sex. They gets half the money, the rest goes to the bar's owner.
Many of these sex workers become indebted to the bar owners through an elaborate system of financial deceit. If they try to escape, the bar owners bribe the local police to find them and bring them back. "Many of the women are trapped, unable to leave because they've become indentured slaves, literally prisoners of the bar owners, "The women are forced to work from 9 am until two in the morning or later.
The next day they've got to be back in place. They're not allowed to read or do anything with their hands, they just have to sit there waiting for clients. That's frustrating, it's psychologically hard, it's enslaving."
Under pressure from the U.S. government, in the last decade Mexico has become a filter to keep third-country nationals out of the United States. That means getting into Mexico is the first serious obstacle for many migrants, and most of the cities near the border has become a tunnel for the flow of people making their way north toward the United States.
Her dream derailed, Sasha says she had no choice but to go to work as a prostitute. She doesn't like her work, but says she had few other options. "There's no work for me back in El Salvador and I have 3 sons there, waiting for me. But my body is tired, too tired, I really don’t know how to escape from this damned place”.

Mexico . There are no official data about the number of irregular migrants crossing Mexico, while it's known that in 2011 as many as 60,000 of them were arrested and repatriated. Nine out of ten of the tens of thousands of men, women and children who enter Mexico as irregular migrants from other countries of Central America, especially El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua. Most of them has as its goal to reach USA.Mexico is one of the few countries in the world to be both destination and transit point for migrants, as well as the starting point for thousands of Mexicans who try to find a job in the USA.They have to defend themselves from people-smugglers and also by the Mexican police, who instead of protecting them, most often robs them.The home for migrants of Ixtepec is an unexpected haven: you get women and men exhausted by days of travel on foot or on the roofs of trains, some were robbed, beaten or raped other, others have nothing. Many of them stops here only the time to sleep in a bed and take a shower.2500 km still separate them from the U.S. border.